The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 45

After dinner when Papa left the table, Mam held my hand to stay.

“How are you doing with … are you still dreaming?” she asked and coughed after she said it, placing a napkin over her mouth, so gracefully that I committed the moment to memory to learn the way.

“Better. It’s only once in a while. But they’re all similar now.”

She leaned back in her chair, her posture perfect. She had already settled so well “back home” as they called it. So why did she let us call Texas home for so long, if she knew that hers was not the same?

“And how are you doing?” she asked, eyes locked with mine, in the soft way Mam smiles at her children, that enigmatic language, when she knows exactly how we feel.

“I’m well,” I answered and mimicked her smile. But she knew better.

No matter how old and together I liked to think I was, sharing any space with my parents, and specifically Mam, who was the only person in my life who always seemed with me, and also always left me, exposed even the most subtle sensitivities.

“Tell me about Satta,” I said finally. “I want to hear about her.”

“There is nothing much to hear, dear,” Mam said. “Her name was Satta Fahnbulleh and she was from a town called Weelor in Cape Mount. Satta fought for Charles Taylor, and she was maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. That’s all I know.”

“That’s all?”

Mam shrugged. “Yes. Unfortunately. What else was there to know? We were all desperate.”

“And there was no way of contacting her? No way to write her?”

“How?” Mam said, lines now spread across her forehead, as if I had already managed to overwhelm her, with just a few hours of time between us.

“Everything will be okay, Tutu. You’re home now,” she said after a brief silence. She stood up from her chair and kissed my cheek as if I was five again, and I was afraid and I longed for my mother, and we had not seen each other in a long time.

Before we reached the Vai Town bridge after SKD Boulevard, traffic had no king, and cars and trucks shared roads with pen-pens and keh-kehs—transport motorbikes and enclosed motorized tricycles—both of which Papa forbade me ever to ride.

“They can’t drive. Those things are dangerous,” he said.

“It’d be easier if the roads weren’t so awful.”

“Seriously,” Mam agreed from the passenger seat.

They had both taken a few days off from the university for my homecoming.

“When will they fix them?” I asked, to which Papa huffed.

“Who knows,” he answered, his hands steady on the wheel.

“And they’ve been this way since the war?”

“Most of them, yes. The rebels destroyed the infrastructure. Pulled out pipes and wires to go sell.”

“Who ruins the thing they’re fighting for?” I shook my head, disenchanted.

“Maybe Liberia is not what they were fighting for,” he said in a low tone, and the words lingered for moments after, haunting me.

Those childhood images of princes marching into a vast and webbed forest—Kru princes and Mano princes and Congo princes. Indeed, Liberia was not the entire motive, the full story. And how could it be? In my classrooms in America, I cringed when we discussed African wars. I argued with a classmate once that America too had once had a civil war, on a day I struggled for words to defend African dignities and contest his claims that Africans were barbaric for always fighting.

But Papa was right that most Liberians, most, did not choose Liberia to be their country. Just as Ivorians did not choose. Just as Ghanaians and so many others did not choose; some men in Berlin in 1884 drew those lines, gave those names. Without agency, who can love a country forced upon them? Those princes from my childhood were fighting not only for their people but also for their nations, the countries they chose. Gio is a country. Mano is a country. Kpelle is a country. Vai is a country. And these nations were centuries old. Men and women across the continent would die with those nationhoods on their hearts. Out of the window, each journeying face a labyrinth I paced for hints of our former life, I melted at every dead end.

“Where did the rebels go?” I asked Papa, and watched as his hands squeezed the steering wheel.

“Look outside the window. They’re all around here,” he said. “Some of these taxi drivers, gas station attendants, security guards. They’re everywhere.”

“They just picked up and resumed their lives as if nothing happened,” Mam said.

As Papa’s truck snailed along a road riddled with potholes, Monrovia seemed to be thriving, bursting with movement. Pen-pen drivers crowded junctions beside markets where coconut, fried plantain, and fresh produce vendors chatted as customers searched their inventory. A man wearing a faded Cleveland Browns T-shirt paced behind three rows of church shoes, neatly polished, as a few customers loitered nearby, taking second looks at the shiny stock while waiting for the next taxi. There were Chiclet and Kleenex sellers, and men waving fresh fish from rank, overflowing buckets by their tables. There were preachers and mechanics and schoolteachers and pimps. Fortune-tellers and accountants and hustlers and caterers for hire. Weave salesmen and saleswomen—“Attachment! Attachment!” they screeched. The packets of straight and wavy, sporadically highlighted Malaysian hair were just like the kinds I would find in Korean-run beauty supply stores on Nostrand and Flatbush Avenues.

There were singing blind beggars, quotidian, and pop-up gas stations with merchandise sealed in glass mason jars and beer bottles, their prices handwritten neatly on cardboard beneath their stands. Bushmeat pushers dangling deer and other forest herbivores by their hind legs. Uniformed schoolgirls who held hands as they ran across the road, giggling, oblivious but self-aware, and it made me think of the Blackgirls in Texas, and wonder about the social order of Liberian lunchrooms.

Cars teetered along and taxi drivers swore out of opened windows with their last breaths.

“I don’t remember these markets,” I said.

“They